On Chesil Beach: Summary and book reviews of On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan, plus links to an excerpt from On Chesil Beach and a biography of Ian McEwan.
On Chesil Beach A Novel
by Ian McEwan
Hardcover: Jun 2007,
208 pages.
Paperback: Jun 2008,
224 pages.
A novel of remarkable depth and poignancy from one of the most acclaimed writers of our time.
It is July 1962. Florence is a talented musician who dreams of a career on the concert stage and of the perfect life she will create with Edward, an earnest young history student at University College of London, who unexpectedly wooed and won her heart. Newly married that morning, both virgins, Edward and Florence arrive at a hotel on the Dorset coast. At dinner in their rooms they struggle to suppress their worries about the wedding night to come. Edward, eager for rapture, frets over Florence’s response to his advances and nurses a private fear of failure, while Florence’s anxieties run deeper: she is overcome by sheer disgust at the idea of physical contact, but dreads disappointing her husband when they finally lie down together in the honeymoon suite.
Ian McEwan has caught with understanding and compassion the innocence of Edward and Florence at a time when marriage was presumed to be the outward sign of maturity and independence.On Chesil Beach is another masterwork from McEwan—a story of lives transformed by a gesture not made or a word not spoken.
BOOK REVIEWS
BookBrowse
When they step into the bell jar of their hotel room Edward and Florence leave all extraneous influences outside, allowing us to microscopically examine the motivations and miscommunications of these two well meaning young people in a controlled atmosphere, in which every misstep is theirs alone and their future happiness might turn on something as spontaneous and irretrievable as a single gesture. Full Review (648 words).
Media Reviews
Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. McEwan's flawless omniscient narration has a curious (and not unpleasantly condescending) fable-like quality...The story itself isn't arresting, but the narrator's journey through it is.
Booklist - Brad Hooper
Starred Review. Conventional in construction and realistic in its representation of addled psychology, the novel is ingenious for its limited but deeply resonant focus.
The New York Times - Jonathan Lethem
McEwan treats [the situation] with a boundless sympathy, one that enlists the reader even as it disguises the fact that this seeming novel of manners is as fundamentally a horror novel as any McEwan’s written, one that carries with it a David Cronenberg sensitivity to what McEwan calls “the secret affair between disgust and joy.”
The Boston Globe
Wrenching, funny, smart, and hugely gratifying in unexpected ways, On Chesil Beach packs a pretty good wallop of its own...On Chesil Beach is as merciful to its characters as it is merciless in its heartbreak. Their bruised pasts and querulous hopes unfold beautifully through the novel, almost destined to collide and then fade into the sorrow of real life.
Miami Herald
Momentous...On Chesil Beach builds a potent suspense swiftly, and McEwan details the couple's sexual encounter with unnerving precision. Such meticulousness underscores how a few moments can define a future, how difficult it is to lay ourselves bare, how human to flee from better destinies. Fortunately, though life is never easy, as the narrator reminds us, gorging ourselves on McEwan's impeccable prose is.
The Washington Post - Jonathan Yardley
McEwan's prose is as masterly as ever, here striking a remarkably subtle balance between detachment and sympathy, dry wit and deep compassion. It reaffirms my conviction that no one now writing in English surpasses or even matches McEwan's accomplishment.
Scotsman on Sunday - Stuart Kelly
What seems ironic is that this kind of novel could well have been written, if not in 1962, then certainly by 1972. In its sepia sentimentality and hyperbolic prurience, McEwan's book manages not to reflect a bygone era, but to belong to one entirely. On Chesil Beach leaves the reader, like its two confused, disgusted and recriminating characters, utterly unfulfilled.
The Guardian - Natasha Walter
No, what matters is whether the novel works as fiction. And it does. Some of the prose in the passages away from the bedroom is more workaday than we have come to expect from McEwan, and lacks the panache of his recent work. The exploration of Florence's love of music, particularly, never quite flares into life. Yet within the bedroom this couple's hesitant attempts at intimacy are nuanced and delicately realised.
The Independent - Justin Cartwright
I can't reveal more of the plot, because it all hinges on this wedding night. But it is a fine book, homing in with devastating precision on a kind of Englishness which McEwan understands better than any other living writer, the Englishness of deceit, evasion, repression and regret.
Recent Reader Reviews
Rated of 5
by Maya Brilliant The only book that broke my heart when reading, it's absolutely stunning the way the characters are driven to the tragedy!
Rated of 5
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(648 words).
Scotsman on Sunday - Stuart Kelly
The Guardian - Natasha Walter
of 5
by Maya
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